He instructed Calvino to call Forensics. Their findings on the hit-and-run needed to be on Marouan’s desk as quickly as possible. It would be better if he, with his years of experience, got the investigation off to a good start before he went on holiday. So Calvino wouldn’t cock it up.
A few minutes later, when he was finally able to relieve himself by quickly ducking into the visitors’ toilet, he had to admit that the incident with the boy had upset him more than he’d expected. Moments later, munching on a chocolate bar, he located Calvino who was ringing the forensics department.
‘This is the plan, kid,’ he said with authority when Calvino had finished his conversation. ‘We’re going to the hospital to see if we can talk to the boy. Then to central dispatch. I want to find out where that hit-and-run call came from.’
‘You’re hopeless,’ Calvino derided him as he glanced at the chocolate bar and caught the car keys Marouan tossed him. ‘Utterly hopeless!’
8
‘One, two, three, four … Count, keep counting,’ Danielle instructed as the boy was lifted from the stretcher to the operating table as carefully as possible on a spinal board. Finally, at ‘ten’, he was lying in the right position for a body X-ray.
Danielle heard the anaesthetist calmly tell him what was going to happen next. ‘I’m going to put you to sleep. Everything will be okay.’ It sounded like something from a fairy tale. But most fairy tales had happy endings, Danielle reflected, while this child’s life would undoubtedly turn out very differently. Perhaps he wouldn’t wake up. She was completely overcome by the kind of empathy that is totally counterproductive in situations like this. She couldn’t fight it off; it crept up on her and nestled deep inside her. She soon noticed that her hands were trembling and that her heart rate had gone up.
She bent over the boy as the anaesthesia took effect and looked at him as reassuringly as she could. And suddenly it struck her that this wasn’t about the boy; she was the one who needed reassuring. The fear was back. The same fear she’d felt six months ago in the African night when she’d fled the soldiers wielding machetes and automatic rifles who’d forced their way into the field hospital. Fleeing had spared her a mad killing spree. But her escape had also meant leaving the children in the medical relief tents to their fate.
That was why she’d promised herself she’d never flee again. So at a moment like this one, she wasn’t about to run from her responsibility for this boy.
Together with the OR assistant, she started to disinfect the stomach, pelvic area and thighs with iodine. She was busy marking the spots that needed to be drilled for the surgical pins when the senior trauma surgeon on-call entered. Nick Radder, in his early sixties, was entertaining enough to grab a drink with in your free time but the minute he put on those surgical scrubs he turned into a right old Machiavellian bully.
‘What have we got here?’ he asked impatiently.
‘Open-book fracture to the pelvis. Using an external fixator to stabilize,’ Danielle stated as she made her first incision.
‘Bernson, you?’ Radder said, taken aback.
‘That’s right, I’m doing this operation.’ She remained focused on the task at hand.
‘I don’t think so,’ Radder said in a tone one might use to deny a whining child an ice cream. ‘I didn’t get out of my warm bed to stand here like an idiot.’
‘Not my problem,’ Danielle said curtly. She hadn’t made eye contact with him, but suspected he was doing his utmost not to grab the scalpel from her hand.
‘I want a full status on this kid,’ Radder said abrasively. ‘And why wasn’t a CT scan done first?’
‘If this pelvic fracture isn’t stabilized immediately, he’ll bleed to death. No simpler way to say it.’ She made her second incision and spread the tissue with a clamp. Meanwhile, the rest of the OR team went about their business undisturbed: totally concentrated on facilitating the operation.
‘How was he was lifted?’ Radder snapped.
‘With the utmost caution,’ she replied, finally glancing up at him. His forehead was sweating slightly. She heard the OR telephone ring.
‘So his head, neck and back were still stabilized?’
‘Right,’ Danielle said, ‘that’s what utmost caution means.’
‘So while you’re pinning his pelvis back together, he can just bleed to death in his head?’
Radder’s words were filled with contempt. In the background Danielle heard the OR assistant who’d answered the telephone say, ‘Doctor Bernson is operating.’
‘Step away, Bernson. I’ll take it from here,’ Radder said. She felt her newly regained composure begin to crumble.
‘It’s the MMT. There’s another emergency call. What should I tell them?’ the assistant asked with the phone still in her hand.
‘Drill,’ Danielle requested.
‘Damn it,’ Radder barked through his teeth.
Danielle looked at her team. It felt like her team. Their eyes assured her that she had their complete support. It gave her a sense of strength. The phone call ended with the message that Dr Bernson was still in surgery. The drill was handed to her and she positioned it at the first mark she’d drawn on the hip.
‘Two centimetres higher, Bernson. You’re too low.’ Radder hissed like a poisonous snake.
‘Perhaps someone could escort Dr Radder out of the OR?’ Danielle said to her assistant with as much control as she could. Her whole body was tense. She tried to focus on the spot she was about to drill but had trouble estimating the correct depth. Her right eye twitched. The sounds of the heart meter, the anaesthesia equipment, the Cell Saver air filtering and the EEG monitor all merged into the rhythmic swishing of the wipers, the sound of the emergency siren and the thrumming of the raindrops against the ambulance’s windscreen … and then blended with the ever-echoing screams of the children in the African hospital tent.
‘Blood pressure’s falling,’ the anaesthetist warned. ‘I can’t keep it stable.’ The sound of the metal drill rotating in the bone was shrill. Danielle drilled the next hole.
‘His pulse is fading fast,’ the anaesthetist shouted.
Even though a child’s body has much less mass than an adult body, Danielle knew they bleed out just as quickly. She heard Radder’s angry voice behind her, ‘If he doesn’t make it, this child’s death is on your conscience, Bernson!’
At that moment she saw she’d drilled too low and that the acute bleeding just continued. Appalled, Danielle realized that Radder was most likely right. She’d have a dead child on her conscience.
Once again.
9
From the fifth floor of the Waterland Medical Centre, Farah looked out over a slowly awakening city. Viewed from up high, through glass, Amsterdam looked like a dream vision, like something from her youth.
As a child, she used to like nothing better than to immerse herself in a world in which everybody lived happily ever after, like in fairy tales. She couldn’t get enough of the story of Layla and Majnun, the two lovers who, because of tragic circumstances, were united only in death. ‘Only then,’ Farah’s mother read to her softly, ‘did they no longer feel pain. And never would again for all eternity. For whoever must endure suffering, and bears it patiently in this world, will be full of joy and bliss in paradise.’
But Farah didn’t want to wait for paradise after death. Despite everything she’d been through as a little girl, she decided that life here on earth was to be her only life. She’d witnessed enough death to know that it marked the definitive end.
To Farah it was all about life before death. And she wanted to make the most of that life. But that conviction was fraught with contradictions. She had a burning desire to experience everything as intensely as possible, and would do so by acting on her impulses and primal urges. But giving in to them was coupled with a fear of losing herself in licentiousness and rolling through life like a mere plaything of chance.
Whenever this fear struck, she would throw herself into a life of order wi
th the same fanaticism, and cherish discipline like a sacred cow. Her chaotic apartment would be turned upside-down and given a cosy and domestic make-over. She would resume her daily visits to the gym, eat her greens, train and meditate, go to bed at a decent hour, get up early and submit her newspaper articles on time. Until this life, too, began to stick in her gullet. Next thing, fuelled by despair, she’d swing back to the other extreme.
And yet, throughout those tumultuous times, one mighty phenomenon always kept her balanced: her curiosity. From childhood, she’d been intrigued by everything that happened around her. The effort to come to grips with the world became her main priority. Writing down her thoughts about everything she saw, heard and experienced made her feel that, despite the many upheavals and setbacks in her life, she could still exert some control over herself and events.
Through the same process she later managed to find a delicate balance in her work as a journalist. Having learnt to control her own sometimes barely governable nature with words, she was now trying to master and understand the forces around her by writing about them.
Distractedly gazing out over Amsterdam, where more and more lights were now coming on, Farah clung to the thought that as long as they were still operating, there was hope for the boy.
She heard footsteps in the corridor behind her. They sounded different from the squeaking rubber soles under the shoes worn by the doctors and nurses who walked past every now and then. When she turned around, she saw the same two detectives she’d met a couple of hours earlier by the burning car in the woods. The younger of the two, the one with the trendy stubble, lavished a lovely smile of recognition on her. His older colleague seemed astonished, if anything, to find her here.
‘Farah,’ the younger detective said as he held out his hand. ‘Are you feeling a little better?’
‘Given the circumstances, yes. Thank you.’
In the way a beginning and an end are inextricably linked, these two men seemed to belong together, with the older detective no doubt symbolizing the end and his colleague the beginning. And like it has been since time immemorial, the negative force was trying to dominate its positive counterpart. The older man, with his washed-out complexion, muscled in. He held out his hand and formally introduced himself as Marouan Diba.
Farah took him to be well over fifty. He must have been a good-looking man once but his weight, the random streaks of grey in his black hair and his jaded attitude suggested that he’d resigned himself to his own mortality, making him look older than his years. And his faint smile concealed elements of anguish – minute particles, all but invisible to an outsider. But Farah recognized them.
She recognized the pain of someone forced to accept the person he’d become. As for herself, she often thought back to who she’d been before she fled Afghanistan as a ten-year-old. That innocence, that idealism, she hadn’t seen them in the mirror since. What she saw, more often than not, was a dark shadow in her pupils. That’s what she saw in Marouan Diba. She heard it in the accusing tone he used with her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me last night who you were and what you were doing there?’
‘You didn’t ask,’ she replied, on her guard.
‘Can you tell me why you’re so interested in the boy?’
‘Interested is the wrong word, detective. I became involved. I happened to be in the Emergency Department when he was wheeled in.’
‘And what were you doing there, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I went to inquire about the woman I’d just knocked out.’
Diba stared at her with raised eyebrows.
‘I was taking part in a martial arts gala at Carré,’ she went on to clarify. ‘The fight didn’t go according to plan. I injured my opponent so badly that she had to go to hospital.’
‘So you went to the Emergency Department because you floored your opponent, and that’s when the boy was brought in?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Could you then explain to me why, shortly after this boy was wheeled in, you raced off to the Amsterdamse Bos?’
Farah felt anger bubbling up inside her. ‘You do know the boy was found in women’s clothing and that he was wearing make-up and lots of jewellery?’ she asked as calmly as possible.
‘We’re aware of that.’
‘And what do you think that means?’ In spite of herself, Farah moved a step forward. Diba was silent. They were now standing so close to each other that their noses were almost touching. ‘Bacha Bazi, Detective Diba, does that ring a bell?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It translates literally as “playing with boys”. And I’m talking about boys aged five and up. Boys whose dirt-poor parents sell them to a warlord for a couple of hundred dollars. Boys dressed as exotic female dancers, but intended first and foremost as bedfellows for dirty old men.’
‘Whatever it’s called, Ms Hafez, what you’re talking about happens in a totally different world from the one you and I inhabit,’ Diba said stiffly.
‘I’m sorry, but the world we’re talking about appears to have found its way to ours,’ Farah replied just a little more sharply than she’d intended. And when she saw the condescending look on his face, she added, ‘Just like you and I found our way to this country.’
That’s when the blonde doctor appeared in the corridor. On her face, the vacant look of a marathon runner who’d barely managed to cross the finishing line. The exhaustion after the lengthy operation seemed to have added years to her face.
Farah gazed at her without a word and felt the hope she’d nursed a minute ago evaporating. It had been an illusion. Of course. Happy endings only exist in fairy tales. And fairy tales can only exist in the shadow of death.
10
Joshua Calvino stared at the bloody bundle of rags that together with some jewellery and ankle bracelets had been stuffed into a transparent plastic bag, which was now lying on his lap. He was with Diba in the Corolla on the way to police central dispatch, but he was oblivious to his surroundings.
Calvino couldn’t stop staring at the bag and kept repeating, almost compulsively, the date and time handwritten on the label.
Friday, zero thirty hours.
Meanwhile, Diba was spouting off at the mouth. The last thing Joshua was in the mood for right now was listening to his clichés. He caught something about ‘agreements’ and ‘media’ and assumed Diba was referring to Farah Hafez. Diba was undoubtedly giving his standard rap about journalists, who according to him were only interested in one thing: namely their own thing. When he first met Diba, Joshua quickly concluded that his ideas about people and the world were so fossilized in his reactionary brain that it was pointless to even try to convince him otherwise.
Joshua was silent as he repeated to himself:
Friday, zero thirty hours.
It was the time the boy had been registered in the trauma room. Joshua pictured him again, lying on the wet tarmac in his girl’s clothing. It was like looking into a bright light and then closing your eyes. The image lingered long afterwards. No matter where he looked or how hard he tried not to, Joshua kept seeing the boy’s image. He also saw the face of the doctor, Danielle Bernson, who’d been first on the scene and had operated on the child.
Bernson had just told them that she’d repaired the boy’s pelvis using pins which she connected to a metal frame in order to stabilize everything. She’d placed pins in his left leg as well. She’d operated on his spleen and inserted a drain in his lungs. Further examination had revealed a severe concussion and two broken ribs and they’d also tended to the rest of his external injuries. The result after hours of operating: he was stable but not out of danger.
Now he had to spend a minimum of five days in complete isolation in the ICU. Nobody except the nursing staff and his doctor could have access to him. This also meant that, for the time being, the boy couldn’t be questioned, something Detective Diba – ‘in the interest of the investigation’ – had pushed for in his own less-than-s
ubtle way.
Friday, zero thirty hours.
Stable, but not out of danger.
If he survived, what lay ahead for a boy like this? A displaced, possibly abused child, who was smuggled across several borders, finally to be left for dead in a foreign country? What would those who’d trafficked and left him there on the road do if they knew that he was alive? There was a lot to be said for keeping the case under wraps for now. Guarding him wasn’t an option at this moment because they couldn’t say if the boy had any vital information or not. Only if they could establish a link between the accident and the discovery of the two bodies in the station wagon would the boy become part of a larger whole. And that larger whole was a criminal retaliation. A completely plausible theory.
A few minutes later when they stepped out of the car at police headquarters, where central dispatch was located, Joshua could tell that it was going to be even warmer today than was forecast. Luckily the air conditioning inside the station was blasting. Otherwise the hot air coming from the computers in combination with the summer heat would have turned the whole department into a subtropical biotope.
The officer who’d taken the call was named Evelien. Joshua saw Holland in all its glory before him: blue eyes, rosy white skin and full red lips. Evelien had ash-blonde curls that fell loosely over the epaulettes of her immaculate white police shirt. She was a woman who loved sweets but loathed bullshit. In her case, the saying ‘nobody fucks with Evelien’ had to be taken quite literally, even if a heap of men on the force secretly desired her beautiful Rubenesque curves. Evelien was a longstanding proponent of monogamy and the doting mother of five children.
Whenever people called the central dispatch in a panic, she was the epitome of ‘cool and collected’. She was purposeful when guiding her colleagues to the location where the call had originated. Last night she’d guided Marouan and Joshua through the Amsterdamse Bos with the same efficiency.
Butterfly on the Storm Page 4